Saturday, June 14, 2014

Antler Art

Did you see our new gallery wall? If so, you may have noticed that we have antlers hanging on the wall. Yep...we're THOSE people now. You know, the people that have zero interest in hunting, have never been closer than 50 feet from a deer, and yet have deer antlers on their wall. I'm following the trend and I'm perfectly okay with it. At first I was looking to purchase my own antlers but A. that's no fun and B. they're expensive. Like these from Pottery Barn for $239...no thank you. I could buy a piece of furniture for that price. Touche to Pottery Barn for convincing people to buy fake antlers for the price of my little brother.

I also like the antlers-with-the-whole-animal-head-attached look too. It's a technical term. These paper mache ones from West Elm are awesome and are significantly cheaper than the Pottery Barn. They're still $84 for the larger sized heads though and they just weren't doing it for me.

Insert Katy craft project here. I happen to have an aunt that buys deer antlers, paints them, and resells them on Etsy. It's all the rage right now <you can see here> She purchased a huge box of antler pairs with skulls attached on Craigslist and thought she had found the antler jackpot. She later found out that reselling antlers with the skull attached is violating some federal law. Oops. Something about how they don't want people killing deer for their antlers and the only way to get both antlers on the skull is (obviously) for the animal to die. Apparently deer shed their antlers one at a time though (who knew?...not me) so reselling one shed antler is okay. So long story long, she gave me a deer skull with a nice pair of antlers.

I purchased some acrylic paint and a wooden plate at Hobby Lobby and went to town.

I decided that the skull part was grossing me out. I kept thinking about where the eye balls and brain would be in relation to the part I was holding. Mind boggling stuff. No wonder I don't hunt. In order to make things less gross, I decided to paint the wood plate the same color as the skull to camouflage the skull. Then, I painted the antlers a nice bright green.

Next, I taped off the tips of the antlers for that dipped/color blocked look, and painted the ends gold.

We waited for the antlers to dry and then used E-600 glue to attach them to the plate.

We also needed a way to hang the plate to the wall so I screwed a simple picture bracket to the back.

How easy was that project? Easier than finding a hillbilly at an OU game.